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In which there’s plenty of room at the Hotel Vue de la Rivière.
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We arrived in Saint-Lô at a quarter past ten on a day that felt like it began six weeks ago, entering the town from roughly the same direction as the 29th Infantry Division did in 1944, though encountering considerably less German artillery. After listening to Garland’s stories a part of me expected Saint-Lô to exist in a time warp—that we’d find the city unchanged from the night the old man crawled out of the river seven decades earlier—but that was not the case. Saint-Lô stood apart from everything we’d seen in France, and not necessarily in a good way. On our drive toward the city center we passed a number of concrete buildings that somehow looked both futuristic and dated, like props from a 1950s sci-fi film, and I wondered aloud why every other French town looked ancient, and this one looked like it just sprung up after the war.
“Most of it did,” Garland said.
“Well what was here before the war?” I asked.
“The same beautiful little town that had been here for a thousand years,” Garland said.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What happened to Saint-Lô?”
“The Allies liberated it, son. They liberated it by bombing it right off the damn map.”
“Wait, while you and Maddie were still here?”
“Yep.”
“Shit.”
“Yep.”
No one said much after that. Garland and Parker peered out their windows while I drove somewhat aimlessly through town. It was late, but a few people still sat outside a café on Rue Torteron. We passed the remains of the old city walls and drove over the Vire, the bridge adorned with flags of countries that helped liberate France. Circling back across the river into town and stopping on a side street I said, “Okay, any idea where Madeleine might live?”
Garland laughed and said, “Son, as much as Maddie would appreciate the irony of me banging on her door in the middle of the night again, I think it best our reunion wait until morning.” Then he pointed across the street at the sign for the Hotel Vue de la Rivière and said, “I’ll be staying there tonight.”
“Wait, do we have reservations?” I asked
“I have several,” Garland said and Parker laughed.
“No, I meant—”
“Son, I know what you meant,” Garland said, slapping me on the back. “And no, I don’t have a reservation to stay at the Hotel Vue de la Rivière, but I’m guessing I won’t need one. If a hotel has “river view” in its name but doesn’t actually offer a view of the river, you can usually count on a vacancy. You two won’t need reservations either, because you’re staying somewhere else.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Hell if I know,” Garland growled, “but it can’t be here. They’re looking for us now. Really looking for us. So the three of us can’t just waltz into some hotel together and ask for a room. The receptionist would say, ‘Bonjour, I just saw the three of you on the six o’clock news, please have a seat while I phone the police.’”
Parker had pulled up the Hotel Vue de la Rivière on my phone and said, “Good news Garland, you picked the sixth ranked hotel in Saint-Lô.”
“Out of how many?” Garland asked.
“Eight.”
Garland laughed and said, “Doesn’t matter. There’s a restaurant right there under the hotel. I’m going to have dinner and go the hell to bed. You two have your choice of the five nicest hotels in town, or the two worst I suppose. Tell ’em it’s your honeymoon. They might even give you a bottle of champagne.” He got out of the van and leaned back in Parker’s open window and said, “Just make sure you’re back here at eight tomorrow morning. We’ve got a busy day ahead. Au revoir kiddos.”